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Native Son

Richard Wright

Book Three (part one)

Book Three (part three)

From the inquest through Bigger’s meeting with Max

Summary

The authorities lead Bigger to the courtroom for the inquest.
Mrs. Dalton testifies that the earring found in her furnace is a
family heirloom that she had given to Mary. She states that she
and her husband have donated millions of dollars to black schools.
Jan follows Mrs. Dalton to the stand. During questioning, the coroner
insinuates that Jan promised Bigger sex with white women if Bigger
joined the Communist Party. Max argues that these kinds of questions
are sensational and designed only to inflame public opinion, but
his objections are overruled.

Mr. Dalton takes the stand and Max is permitted to question him.
As Max knows that Mr. Dalton owns a controlling share in the company
that manages the building where Bigger’s family lives, he asks Dalton
why black tenants pay higher rents than whites for the same kinds
of apartments. Dalton replies that there is a housing shortage on
the South Side. Max retorts that there are areas of the city without
housing shortages, and Dalton replies that he thought black tenants
preferred living together on the South Side. Max then succeeds in
making Dalton admit that he refuses to rent to black tenants in
other neighborhoods. He accuses Dalton of giving some of the real
estate profits to black schools merely to alleviate his guilty conscience.
Before dismissing Mr. Dalton, Max asks him if the living conditions
of Bigger’s family might have contributed to the death of his daughter.
Dalton cannot comprehend the question.

The coroner exhibits Bessie’s body to the jurors. Bigger
knows that the authorities are using Bessie only to ensure that
he will get the death penalty for killing Mary. Bigger becomes angry
that they are using Bessie in death just as Bessie’s white employer
used her while she was alive. He feels that the whites are using
both him and Bessie as if they were mere property.

Bigger is indicted for rape and murder. When the police
take him to the Dalton home and ask him to reenact the crime, he
backs himself against the wall and refuses. Outside, a mob screams
for his death. Bigger sees a burning cross across the street. He
feels that Hammond, in giving him the cross to wear, has
betrayed him: the preacher has made him feel a kind of hope, but
the burning cross leaves him hopeless once again. Back in his jail
cell, Bigger rips off the cross and flings it away. When Hammond
tries to visit him again, Bigger furiously refuses him. He vows
never to trust anyone again.

Bigger asks to see a newspaper, which reports that he
is certain to receive the death penalty. A hysterical black prisoner
is brought to Bigger’s cell, demanding the return of his papers.
Another prisoner tells Bigger that this hysterical prisoner went
crazy from studying too much at a university. The man had been trying
to understand why blacks were treated so badly and had been picked
up at the post office, where he was waiting to speak to the president.
His screaming disturbs other prisoners, and he is taken away on
a stretcher.

Max visits Bigger in his cell. Hopeless, Bigger tells
Max that none of his efforts will be of use. Bigger feels destined
to die to appease the public, and, therefore, has no possibly of
winning the trial. Max tries to get Bigger to trust him. Despite
his best efforts to avoid opening up and trusting anyone, Bigger
does end up trusting Max, but still believes Max’s efforts will
prove futile. Max then asks Bigger why he killed Mary. Excited at
the prospect of finally feeling understood, Bigger tells Max that
he did not rape Mary and hints that he killed her by accident. When
Max presses him further about his feelings, Bigger states that Mary’s
unorthodox behavior frightened and shamed him. When Max points out
that Bigger could have avoided the murder by trying to explain himself
to Mrs. Dalton, Bigger explains that he could not help himself and
that it was as if someone else had stepped inside him and acted
for him.

Bigger explains to Max that there has always been a line
drawn in the world separating him from the people on the other side
of the line, who do not care about his poverty and shame. He says
that whites do not let black people do what they want, and admits
that he himself does not even know what he wants. Bigger simply
feels that he is forbidden from anything he might actually want.
All his life, he has felt that whites were after him. Thus, even
his feelings were not wholly his own, as he could only feel what
whites were doing to him. Bigger once wanted to be an aviator, but
he knew that black men were not allowed to go to aviation schools.
He wanted to join the army, but it proved to be segregated and based
upon racist laws. He saw the white boys from his school go on to
college or the military when he could not. Having lost hope, he
began living from day to day. Bigger says that after he killed Mary
and Bessie, he ceased to be afraid for a brief while.

Bigger snorts at the idea that the Daltons think they
have changed something by donating Ping-Pong tables to the South
Side Boys’ Club, as he and his friends planned most of their robberies while
hanging around the Club. Bigger says the church did not help him
either, as it preached happiness only in the afterlife while he longed
for happiness in this world. He also believes that once he is executed,
there will be no afterlife. Bigger tells Max that he took a chance
and lost, but that it is over now and he does not want anyone to
feel sorry for him. Max decides to enter a plea of “not guilty”
to buy some time to plead Bigger’s case.

Analysis

The brief appearance of a crazed inmate in Bigger’s
cell gives us another example of the narrow range of choices with
which Bigger has grown up. We have seen some of these limited choices
already: Bigger’s mother attempts to get by with religion and the
hope for a better life beyond this world; Bessie relies on alcohol
and dancing to ease her pain; and Bigger retreats behind his wall,
lashing out violently when pushed too far. With the mad inmate,
Wright shows us the danger of another option: attempting to tackle
the problems of race relations using pure reason. The former student
is driven mad by looking at the race problem closely and trying
to understand the situation of blacks in America. Wright implies
that approaching the situation rationally is as dangerous as lashing
out with a gun—and, in some ways, less effective.

Though Bigger feels the injustice of his situation intensely,
he is uneducated and inarticulate, and therefore sometimes unable
to convey his feelings adequately. Although his understanding becomes
clearer as the novel moves on, he still struggles—even within his
own thoughts—for a way to describe his world. Wright sidesteps these
limitations of Bigger’s character by creating the character of the
mad student, who is intelligent enough to be able to voice his own
philosophical perspectives on Bigger and the world that has created
him. Furthermore, at the inquest, Max is able to make explicit the
hypocrisy of the Daltons and their charity, something Bigger has
sensed but has not expressed outright. As a white man, Max is also
able to attack Dalton directly, something a black man in Wright’s
Chicago would not have done. Max mocks Dalton’s pathetic gesture
of benevolence—his gift of Ping-Pong tables to the Boys’ Club—and
makes clear that Dalton is a major part of a system that corrals
black tenants into the ghetto, creating the social conditions that
have produced Bigger. Dalton is blind to these allegations, just
as he is to Max’s assertion that his role in creating these conditions
makes him complicit in Mary’s murder.

It is clear that the authorities do not consider Bessie’s
rape and murder to be as important as the murder of Mary Dalton.
They use Bessie’s battered body merely as evidence to establish
the larger crime, which, in the eyes of the public, is the outrageousness
of Bigger’s act against white society. We get the impression that
Bigger’s trial is only a sensational spectacle for the public, and
not an attempt to serve justice. The authorities’ attempts to force
Bigger to reenact his crime in Mary’s bedroom reinforce this interpretation
of the trial. We see that such ostensible evidence gathering is
largely pointless, as Bigger’s guilt has been decided before he
is ever arrested. Instead, the reenactment serves only to provide
sensational photographs to print in the next racist news article
about the trial.

Max’s acknowledgement of Bigger as a human being allows
Bigger to talk—and even think—about himself in ways he never has before.
Throughout Native Son, Wright focuses on this idea
that physical oppression leads to psychological repression. Bigger
has spent his entire life trying to hide behind a wall, attempting
to shut out the realities of life and his feelings about these grim
realities. Such repression has left him with violence as his only
outlet. Max, however, by simply recognizing Bigger’s life and feelings,
allows Bigger to shed this burden of repression that he has carried
for so long. Bigger can now, at least tentatively, emerge from behind
his wall and start to examine his world for what it really is.

Racism is a prison to both the patient and the agent, it is pepper thrown to the African wound but also puffs back to the White's eyes, they in turn all feel the sweetness in their different bodies,...